Incomprehensibility, Understanding, Control

Some assorted and eclectic pieces from my daily wandering through the internets on the economic bill: Larry summers is trying to kill infrastructure. Some moderate/conservative democratic congressman, Jim Cooper, is saying that Obama is secretly pushing for less spending. Venture capitalist progressives (?) like Leo Hindery are being shut out. And The Nation's daily pessimism seems too much on point. Meanwhile, the emerging narrative is something like, bipartisanship vs war: who's winning?




I haven't cared much for the hermeneutical divinations of Obama's cabinet picks nor for the now-continual analysis of media representations and narratives. Analyzing representations is easy, and is all the media has done for two years during the campaign. The sorts of narratives thrown up by the media, mainstream or otherwise, are attempts to make sense and organize the reality or unreality or sur-reality of politics. This clearly isn't a form/content issue (as if things could be simplified so clearly) but neither is it all form; there is a content here, all the more unstable in its formlessness.

What I mean, more prosaically, is that I do not understand any of the news stories above. I don't understand the economy, or politics, or political economy. And I distressingly feel that reading neither James Galbraith nor Frederick Jameson would help me. If we could spy on the government the way they spy on us, or, more simply, if we could assign an ethnographer to the "field" of the White House, I'm not sure we could fully account for the process by which this bill is being produced, let alone understand a more abstract entity, like "The American Economy."

We would certainly learn something from all these endeavors and more. But like a recession, the content of these proceedings is immanently elusive, something defined in retrospect (perhaps, borrowing from Zizek, we can reframe the Nation article: the US economy will have been destroyed by Geithner and Summers). But by asserting a content, however elusive, we also recognize at some level the consequences: the 'realness' of the economy (that way that its forces produce something recognizable as reality), and also the realness of our political situation (the way that it is susceptible to forces that shift it one way or another).

These thoughts, or lack of thoughts, plus a weird non-encounter from earlier today, plus the perpetual stillness of Orange County, leave me this afternoon vaguely terrified.